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‘gun on our hips’ had limited diplomatic and strategic utility. ‘There is no powder in the gun, for it could not be drawn, and this is certainly known,’ he said. So Byrnes evidently discovered at London that same month. (Bush later wrote incredulously of Admiral William Leahy: ‘His view was like the postwar attitude of some of the public and many in Congress: There was an atomic bomb “secret”, written perhaps on a single sheet of paper, some sort of magic formula. If we guarded this, we alone could have atomic bombs indefinitely.’) Truman himself had bleak thoughts that fall. Following Byrnes’s failure to sway the Soviets on a range of issues at London, the President glumly told his budget director, Harold Smith, ‘there are some people in the world who do not seem to understand anything except the number of divisions you have’. Smith objected: ‘Mr President, you have an atomic bomb up your sleeve.’ ‘Yes,’ came the reply, ‘but I am not sure it can ever be used.’32

Sensing the same thing, and worried over growing Congressional efforts to take control of the atomic-energy issue, Byrnes, in January 1946, called Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson and appointed him chair of a new committee charged to ‘draft a plan for the international control of atomic energy’. Acheson objected that he knew nothing about the issue; Byrnes told him not to worry, because the committee would include men who did, among them Bush, James Conant, and Groves. Not satisfied, Acheson added a board of consultants to the committee, including several engineers, Robert Oppenheimer, and, as head, David Lilienthal, former czar of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Part of the point was to outflank or outvote Groves. Acheson had doubts about the way the administration had thus far handled the issue of international control—‘Byrnes and Truman didn’t understand anything about the bomb,’ he told Lilienthal. As Acheson knew, or soon learned, Oppenheimer’s and Lilienthal’s doubts ran even deeper. ‘What is there that is secret?’ Lilienthal wrote in his journal following his appointment to the consultants’ group. ‘If my hunch that in the real sense there are no secrets (that is, nothing that is not known or knowable) would be supported by the facts, then real progress would be made.’ Tutored after hours in nuclear physics by Oppenheimer, Acheson, along with Lilienthal, steered the committee away from Groves’s insistence that nothing of significance be shared with the Soviets. In mid-March, the committee produced its findings, dubbed the Acheson-Lilienthal report. It called for the creation of an international Atomic Development Authority, empowered to control radioactive raw materials including uranium, oversee the process of fission worldwide, and manage all research involving atomic explosives. There was deliberate vagueness in the plan, and it established no timetable for the release to the international body of information and resources by the United States. But Acheson and Bush were clear when they described the report on the radio: ‘The extremely favored position with regard to atomic devices, which the United States enjoys at present, is only temporary. It will not last. We must use that advantage now to promote international security and to carry out our policy ofbuilding a lasting peace through international agreement.’33

Faced with such a flexible yet resolute commitment to the internationalization of atomic research—a possible return to a ‘republic of science’, or at least a global oligarchy—Truman balked. Rather than approve the Acheson-Lilienthal plan and release it to the public, as Acheson urged him to do, the President instead appointed Bernard Baruch head of the US delegation to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, and asked that he ‘translate’ the report ‘into a workable plan’. Baruch, who had made a fortune in the stock market, was in 1946 75 years old, nearly deaf, and puffed with pride over his reputation—‘without foundation in fact and entirely self-propagated’, thought Acheson. ‘I am one tough baby,’ Baruch proclaimed on accepting the